StormlightTech (Twitter)“Thinking that we might have been the ones to teach @microbitch2017 and @ShortShadyBlog how to do webmentions? Has it worked? Bridgy must be failing, because, no retweets showing up comments.”
Colin Devroe (cdevroe.com)I’m noticing in the responses section of your site (and on this particular post) that you’ve got a “Mentions” section, and that when I click on some avatars I get the original post while others (for Twitter) link to the profile page. This isn’t the typical Webmention plugin for WordPress behavior, so I’m curious what particular lines you’ve changed in the plugin and how as I’d love to have this behavior instead of the less useful links to the profiles that the plugin typically gives. Thanks!
I actually kind of understand this—only because I think Mastodon is at odds with the Indieweb.
The other example of this behavior I’ve seen was when Greg McVerry, a college professor and member of the IndieWeb community, tried to join a Mastodon instance that was specific to researchers and professors in higher education. Sadly he found out, like Joe, that syndicating content from other locations was not acceptable there. As I recall, they also required an automatic content warning on almost everything posted to that particular instance which seemed an additional travesty to me. I think he ultimately joined mastodon.social and found he didn’t have any similar issues there and anyone who wanted to follow him from any other instances still could. I’m sure he can provide some additional details and may have posted about it sometime in the summer of 2018 when it happened.
The tough part is that each instance, though federated among many others, can have its own terms of service and set up. Some instances can be and certainly are run by their own tyrannical administrators, and I suppose that it’s their right since they’re paying for the server and the overhead. The solution is to do some research into some instances and find one that isn’t going to ban you for what would otherwise seem like average use to most. I’ve found mastodon.social to be relatively simple in its terms and its massive size also tends to cover up a lot of edge cases, so you’re unlikely to run into the same problems there. (It is also run by the creator of Mastodon, who has generally been IndieWeb friendly.)
The issue Joe has run into also points out a flaw of the overall Fediverse in that just like each real-world country can have its own laws and there is a broader general international law, the international laws aren’t as well codified or respected by each individual country. When you’re operating in someone else’s country, you’re bound to follow their local laws and even customs. Fortunately if you don’t like them there are lots of other places to live. And this is one of the bigger, mostly unseen, benefits of the IndieWeb: if you have your own website, you can create your own rules/laws and do as you please without necessarily relying as heavily on the rules of others.
I’ll note that some in the IndieWeb (Aaron Parecki, Ryan Barrett, Mathias Pfefferle, Jacky Alcine, et al.) have been playing around with or thinking about adding the ActivityPub protocols so that their own websites act as stand-alone members of the Fediverse. Since I know Joe has recently moved to WordPress, I’ll mention that there are two separate projects to help WordPress sites federate:
* ActivityPub plugin for WordPress from Mathias Pfefferle
* Bridgy Fed from Ryan Barrett
Naturally neither of these (yet) supports all of the protocols so some functionality one would find on Mastodon won’t necessarily work, but I suspect that over time that they eventually will. It’s been a while since I tried out BridgyFed, but I’ve had the ActivityPub plugin set up for a bit and have noticed a lot of recent work by Mathias Pfefferle to use it for himself. I still have to tweak around with some of my settings, but so far it provides some relatively useful results. The best part is that I don’t need to syndicate content to Mastodon, but users there can subscribe to me at @chrisaldrich, for example, instead of @chrisaldrich. The results and functionality aren’t perfect yet, but with some work we’ll get there I think.
Good luck finding (or creating) an instance that works for you!
Chris Finazzo (Twitter)I cannot use Goodreads. The user experience just makes me too sad.
— julia ferraioli (@juliaferraioli) February 9, 2019I stared using it about 8 months ago when I signed up for Audible. The site and app are hot garbage, so I’ve been looking at going the @indiewebcamp route... pic.twitter.com/BFUzDJ5XjP
— Chris Finazzo (@chrisfinazzo) February 9, 2019However, because I use Jekyll and don’t pray to some JavaScript-powered deity, I have to try to assemble things myselfpic.twitter.com/TTquETcf3i
— Chris Finazzo (@chrisfinazzo) February 9, 2019
Kim Hansen (Twitter)Is there a 2019 equivalent of Gordon Korman? I’d like to introduce my nieces to the books, but it seems like they’re probably pretty dated the technology-wise these days.
— kim (@realkimhansen) February 7, 2019
There are only a few places where there are now seeming plot holes where a cell phone would have made all the difference (example: Artie Geller going missing in No Coins, Please!), but they’re generally so well told and so funny that I’m more than willing to suspend my disbelief.
In A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag where energy technology figures relatively prominently, it still reads really well, particularly because we’ve still got those types of technology problems. Even the computer teacher quitting when the computers crash and don’t save work because of power issues at school reads well in a modern context. Of course, this book is set on Long Island, so it might not have the Canadian “representation” that you’re looking to recommend to them.
I’ve only made my way through a couple of the Macdonald Hall series, but those are just good clean prankster fun, so modern technology doesn’t seem to have factored in for me. While most of Korman’s work (at least that I’ve read thus far) is very male-centered, these particular books have some good female representation and depict the girls at the school across the street as very modern and on a generally equal footing with boys, particularly with the antiquated, dotty, old-school head mistress as a foil. On this front, I’d give Korman very high marks in comparison with other relatively recent juvenile literature classics like Beverly Cleary who even through the 70’s was having main characters like Henry regularly say overtly sexist things like “Beezus is pretty smart–for a girl.”
The tough part of more modern juvenile literature is that a lot of it has gone much further upstream and spread out considerably compared to what we had available in our youths. There’s a huge swath of YA work that has filled in but which borders more on soft-core Danielle Steele a la the Twilight Series. Almost all of these are also written as parts of longer series of 3, 4, 7, or more books too, which can be annoying because the plot is often strung out in choppy ways. If they’re a bit older and in high school, perhaps John Green’s work may be appropriate?
If they haven’t come across them, I always like to recommend Holes by Louis Sachar; The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg; Lois Lowry’s The Giver (et al.) which I’ve been re-reading lately too; and Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. All of these are generally great timeless literature, and I often recommend them to adults who may have missed them.
I’m also a fan of the more recent Mysterious Benedict Society series by Trenton Lee Stewart which has some of the rollicking fun of Korman with some interesting twists, plotting, and has some well-rounded representation of characters.
A while back I read the first in a series of steampunk/pirate books called A Riddle in Ruby by Kent Davis which had a lot of interesting science, alchemy, science fiction, and adventure. While it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, it was pretty well done, entertaining, and may appeal to them.
Also similar to Korman, but even older to the point that they read as period literature, they might find The Great Brain series by John D. Fitzgerald or The Mad Scientists’ Club by Bertrand R. Brinley highly engaging. Sadly, while entertaining and with a lot of heart and cultural intelligence, they don’t have much, if any, female representation, primarily as a function of their authors and when they were written.
Hayley Campbell (Twitter)PSA: with all the websites dying, go save the stuff you wrote as pdfs before they disappear. Otherwise you’ll be trying to get jobs with pocket fluff.
— Hayley Campbell (@hayleycampbell) February 1, 2019
Ben Welsh of the LA Times data desk has built Savemy.News which leverages Twitter in combination with archive.is, webcitation.org, and archive.org to allow journalists to quickly create multiple archives of their work by simply inputting the URLs of their related pages. It’s also got a useful download functionality too.
Richard MacManus, founder of RWW, wrote a worthwhile article on how and why he archived a lot of his past work.
Those with heavier digital journalism backgrounds and portfolios may find some useful information and research coming out of Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Dodging the Memory Hole series of conferences. I can direct those interested to a variety of archivists, librarians, researchers, and technologists should they need heavier lifting that simpler solutions than archive.org, et al.
Additional ideas for archiving and saving online work can be found on the IndieWeb wiki page archival copy. There are some additional useful ideas and articles on the IndieWeb for Journalism page as well. I’d welcome anyone with additional ideas or input to feel free to add to any of these pages for others’ benefit as well. If you’re unfamiliar with wiki notation or editing, feel free to reply to this post; I’m happy to make additions on your behalf or help you log in and navigate the system directly.
If you don’t have a website where you keep your personal archive and/or portfolio online already, now might be a good time to put one together. The IndieWeb page mentioned above has some useful ideas, real world examples, and even links to tutorials.
As an added bonus for those who clicked through, if you’re temporarily unemployed and don’t have your own website/portfolio already, I’m happy to help build an IndieWeb-friendly website (gratis) to make it easier to store and display your past and future articles.
Jack Jamieson (jackjamieson.net)Thank you to @RyersonResearch and especially @joyceemsmith for inviting me to talk about my research today. I had a great time talking IndieWeb, and specifically, Bridgy.
I presented a study I’ve been working on about Bridgy, i...
Jorge Toledo (Twitter)I think it's worth a close look.
— Jorge Toledo (@eldelacajita) January 31, 2019
Also, thanks to @jgmac1106 for jumping in.
Check his replies (which are somehow connected/made from his own site in a way I still have to understand ;) https://t.co/OWChQnaSeF
Often I think it’s more illustrative to see what IndieWeb is by seeing what it can do. Greg and I are both publishing first on our own websites, and only then syndicating our replies to Twitter, where you’re seeing them. Then any responses to those posts are being fed back to our websites via the Webmention protocol with the help of Brid.gy in a process known as backfeed. The nice part is that he and I can have a website to website conversation (I’m on the WordPress CMS and he’s using WithKnown as his CMS of choice) without needing to use Facebook, Twitter, etc. as corporate intermediaries–typically unless we want to include others like you who aren’t using their own platforms yet.
To a great extent, we’re using simple web standards and open protocols so that our websites function like our own personal social media services without giving away all the control and the data to third parties. If you prefer, you can also think of IndieWeb as what the old blogosphere might have become if MySpace, Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, et al. hadn’t happened.
As another example of what IndieWeb related technology is about: I haven’t quite finished all the moving pieces yet, but my personal website is also federated in the sense that you can follow me @chrisaldrich on Mastodon or other parts of the Fediverse. (Don’t judge the output too harshly just yet, I’m still working on it, but it’s at least a reasonable proof of concept that many are also doing now. I also don’t have direct replies via Mastodon working just yet either…)
Please do let us know if you have other questions. We’re happy to help.
Post your response to this using Twitter:
David Shanske (david.shanske.com)I spent some time in the last few days watching the second season of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I’ve always enjoyed period pieces, especially 20th century ones. This is set in 1959. I can’t pretend I was a Jew in New York in the 1950s…my parents were though, although certainly not the economic...
Of course I’ve got worse complaints about the show’s characters and the seeming non-differentiation of their individual voices…
I also watched Diner earlier in the week, and while very far from being my favorite film, it had a more nuanced portrayal of 1959 culture than Maisel has had. Of course Barry Levinson (b. 1942) actually had the experience of living through the 50’s compared with Amy Sherman-Palladino (b. 1966) who didn’t. She obviously has a drastically different lens.
Lee Kelleher (Twitter)“@gadgetopia Good question! From what I've read, pingbacks suffered from poor security/spam and being XMLRPC based. How webmentions differ, I'm not sure. I assume it's W3C's reimagining of it.”
Barnaby Walters (waterpigs.co.uk)I tried to plug in this LED strip I bought but nothing happens. 5400 LEDs but none of them turn on?! and when I tried to peel the backing off to stick it to something, all the LEDs fell out D: 0/10 would not buy again
Generally that type also burn so hot, that they need a custom metal slug as a heat sink to help cool them and redistribute the heat. Without the thermal help, they often melt/burn out almost immediately. Another issue that some don’t always realize or remember, depending on your electrical background, is that those types of LEDs have a polarity and need to be connected in the correct orientation or current won’t flow across them, thus making them appear not to work.
Of course, if you’ve done all this and they still don’t work…
Andy Bell (Andy Bell)Let’s make 2019 the year of personal sites and the IndieWeb.
If it helps, Max Böck recently wrote some excellent articles (with code examples) on using Eleventy to easily syndicate content to Twitter as well as to add Webmention functionality. If you haven’t seen them yet, they may help you along your journey a bit more quickly. Both can be found at: https://indieweb.org/Eleventy
Jeremy Cherfas (Jeremy Cherfas)Quite by coincidence, I'm sure I just yesterday listened to Malcolm Gladwell and Dave Hill talking about Lords of Chaos and the black metal scene. https://brokenrecordpodcast.com/#/episode-7-dave-hill/
Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)When I received Chris’s comment, my first response was that I should delete my post or at least the incorrect part of it. It’s embarrassing to have your incorrect understandings available for public view. But I decided to leave the post as is but put in a disclaimer so that others would not be misled by my misunderstandings.
This experience reminded me that learning makes us vulnerable. Admitting that you don’t know something is hard and being corrected is even harder. Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine? Could I be more gentle? How often have I graded my students’ work and only focused on what they did wrong? Or forgotten that feeling of vulnerability when you don’t know something, when you put your work out for others to judge? This experience has also reminded me that it’s important that we as teachers regularly put ourselves into situations in which we authentically grapple with not knowing something. We should regularly share our less than fully formed understandings with others for feedback. It helps us remember that even confident learners can struggle with being vulnerable. And we need to keep in mind that many of our students are not confident learners. ❧
While writing things out loud to no audience can be helpful and useful on an individual level, it’s often even more helpful to have some sort of productive and constructive feedback. While a handful of likes or positive seeming responses can be useful, I always prefer the ones that make me think more broadly, deeply, or force me to consider other pieces I hadn’t envisioned before. To me this is the real value of these open and often very public thought spaces.
For those interested in the general idea, I’ve been [bookmarking/tagging things around the idea of thought spaces I’ve read on my own website](https://boffosocko.com/tag/thought-spaces/). Hopefully this collection helps others better understand the spectrum of these ideas for themselves.
With respect to the vulnerability piece, I’m reminded of an episode of The Human Current I listened to a few weeks back. There was an excellent section that touched on building up trust with students or even a class when it comes to providing feedback and criticism. Having a bank of trust makes it easier to give feedback as well as to receive it. Here’s a link to the audio portion and a copy of the relevant text.
Cathie LeBlanc (Desert of My Real Life)Chris was incredibly gentle in his correction. It makes me think about how I respond to my students’ work. Am I as gentle with their work as Chris was to mine? ❧